Alphaville - Jean-Luc Godard

 ALPHAVILLE - JEAN-LUC GODARD

I've seen the film and now I've read the book but I'm still at a loss as to what Alphaville is actually about. The film was scripted and directed by Jean-Luc Godard so it was never going to be run-of-the-mill and based on his oeuvre was always going to be stylish - which it is, but almost to the point of distraction. Perhaps that's the point?

Set some time in the future, Alphaville is the name of a city where society is run by a gigantic super-computer called Alpha 60, where life is based on pure logic and technocracy. All emotion has been eradicated and all words pertaining to emotions are no longer in use. Bibles have been replaced by dictionaries that are continuously being updated not with new words but with words being deleted. Language, in fact, seems to no longer have any meaning and words just go round in circles as illustrated by when receptionists for example, instead of saying "You're welcome" say "I'm very well, thank you, not at all."

According to Alpha 60 via its piped broadcasts 'The present is the form of all life, and there are no means by which this can be avoided. Time is a circle which is endlessly revolving. Everything has been said. Nothing existed here before us. No one. We are absolutely alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. One isolated word or an isolated detail in a drawing can be understood but the comprehension of the whole escapes us.'

Which sounds rather similar to how our present day Facebook and social media is.

Into this dystopia enters Lemmy Caution, a sort of secret agent/gumshoe detective posing as a newspaper journalist whose mission - like Willard's in Apocalypse Now regarding Colonel Kurtz - is to terminate with extreme prejudice the architect of Alpha 60, Professor von Braun. After much chasing around and thwarting of assassination attempts upon his own life, Caution succeeds in his mission and kills von Braun and destroys Alpha 60, escaping Alphaville with von Braun's daughter (in the film played by Anna Karina) who, emerging from her oppressed mind-state tells Caution she loves him. 

And that's it.

It's to be presumed Alphaville as in the city is a metaphor for totalitarianism though whether it's aimed at the Russian or the Western model is down to the reader/viewer to decide? What is clear, however, is that if anything Alphaville as in the story and the film is an exercise in Pop Art and is essentially a Lichtenstein-style comic strip captured on celluloid. If viewed this way and read this way then it starts to make some kind of sense. Though what it's actually about is still somewhat open to question.

John Serpico

Pic - Jack Kerouac

 PIC - JACK KEROUAC

Jack Kerouac's last novel, completed just weeks before his death and what springs to mind on reading it is the 10000 Maniacs song Hey Jack Kerouac from their In My Tribe album, and the lines: "Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried for none other, than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and then dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood." And that, essentially, is the story of Jack Kerouac and the story also of Pictorial Review Jackson, the ten-year-old narrator of Pic.

In many ways this is On The Road but through the eyes of an orphaned black child, told and written phonetically in a patoi-like North Carolina dialect. It's the story of that child as he travels across America with his elder brother, first to New York and then to California, with him describing the places he sees and the people he meets in a wide-eyed manner brimful of innocence and wonder. Pictorial, or 'Pic' for short, is the proverbial 'little boy lost' searching for a place he might call a home in a world daring to drag him down.

As might be expected and even hoped for, there are a lot of familiar Kerouac traits within these pages as in the sense of forward motion through the act of travelling, descriptions of places and people encountered, the celebration of jazz, the sense of adventure, and the sense of enthusiasm unbound. As exclaimed by Pic's elder brother at the start of their travels: 'Boy! You and me's hittin that old road for the WAY-yonder. Hey, look out everybody, here we come.' And it very much continues in that vein from there on, even when dealing with poverty, hunger, exhaustion and despair.

An interesting part of the story is when they cross the Mason Dixie line when travelling on a bus and on being told this by his brother, Pic is confused as he hadn't seen any kind of line at all so can only presume he must have been asleep when they crossed it.

'What did the line look like?' Pic asks him, to which his brother replies that he didn't know because he hadn't seen it either. 'But there is such a line,' he tells Pic 'Only thing is it ain't on the ground, and it ain't in the air neither, it's jess in the head of Mason and Dixie, jess like all other lines, state lines, parallel thirty-eight lines and iron Europe curtain lines is all jess 'maginery lines in people's heads and don't have nothing to do with the ground. Yes sir, that's all it is.'

And then there's the old man they meet along the road past the Susquehanna River who tells them he's heading to Canada, who doesn't stop talking and doesn't stop walking. Pic and his brother follow him for some miles until they realise he's probably crazy and so leave him to forge ahead alone until he's gone like a ghost. And then it dawns upon Pic's brother that it probably was a ghost, doomed to walk the highways and byways of America forever, always looking to find Canada but never getting there because he's going the wrong way all the time. And you wonder: Was this Jack Kerouac himself? And in fact, are all the characters in Pic aspects or depictions of how Kerouac saw himself?

At the age of 47 Jack Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage brought about by a lifetime of alcohol abuse. He left behind him, however, numerous books and poems that have influenced generations of readers, his crowning glory being On The Road. The thing is, it's actually debatable as to whether On The Road is Kerouac's best book or not? It's the most influential, without any doubt, but for a fuller and better understanding and appreciation of him and the whole Beat Generation 'explosion' it's advisable to read his other books as well, Pic being just one of them.

John Serpico

Amsterdam - Ian McEwan

 AMSTERDAM - IAN MCEWAN

I was an Ian McEwan virgin. Never read anything by him before in my life but being tri-curious I thought I'd take the big plunge and give him a go. It was the title of his 1998 Booker Prize winner, Amsterdam, that attracted me as I wanted to know what it might be about and with that I entered blindly. I tell you: It was like entering Pan's labyrinth.

Essentially, Amsterdam turns out to be a morality play centring upon two men. One, a newspaper editor and the second a composer commissioned to write a concerto to mark the approaching millennium. Binding them together is the fact of them both being ex-lovers of a socialite who has suddenly passed away from an unspecified illness. Following her funeral, her husband approaches the newspaper editor with some photographs taken by his late wife of the current British Foreign Secretary dressed in women's clothes.

Knowing that by publishing the photographs the circulation figures of his newspaper will be boosted ten-fold and reverse it's decline, the editor is all for it although the composer objects to their publication on the grounds of it being a betrayal of their ex-lover's private life. Apart from reviving the fortunes of his newspaper, the editor also knows that if published the photos will lead to the immediate ruin of the Foreign Secretary, therefore saving the country from him being the next Prime Minister.

It all makes for a good, liberal argument. Should a person's private life be used to expose hypocrisy? The Foreign Secretary is of the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade; a family values man and scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers and travellers; openly talking about the reintroduction of national service and of taking the country out of Europe. Does it matter that in his private life he likes to dress up as a woman? The composer argues not: "If it's OK to be a transvestite," he says "then it's OK for a racist to be one. What's not OK is to be a racist."

It's a good point well made. Is it right to court and pander to prejudice in a bid to counter prejudice? Is 'by any means necessary' really always as clear cut as that? 

Years ago there were rumours of a set of photographs floating around of Margaret Thatcher's husband, Dennis, backscuttling a call girl. If it's true these photos existed then why were they never published and if they had been published would it have led to the downfall of Thatcher? Being an avowed advocate of Victorian, Christian family values they would surely have damaged Thatcher irrecoverably but what would that have said about British society? That war crimes are okay, that the wholesale destruction of mining communities is fine, that taking a wrecking ball to civil society is acceptable? Let your husband be caught indulging his extramarital peccadillos, however, then you're for the high jump and no question about it.

In more recent times, following accusations of under-age child abuse and publication of the photo showing Prince Andrew with his arm around the accuser, though his reputation has been damaged the prince seems to have got away with it. Following the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his aide, the Health Secretary was forced to resign though not before being defended by the Prime Minister. Give it a year or so and it can be almost guaranteed that Hancock will be back in politics.

The question of morality, hypocrisy and ethics is what McEwan's book spins on then, and in his well-written dance of words leads to the answer to 'who will survive and what will be left of them?' The title of the book - Amsterdam - comes into it because that's where the editor and the composer end up, at the Concertgebouw for a rehearsal of the millennial symphony and where the moral conundrum is resolved.

According to various literary critics, Amsterdam is 'brilliant' and 'chilling' whilst according to A S Byatt it's 'shocking'. Are these people somehow bribed to laud such plaudits upon these books they review, I wonder? Ian McEwan is a professional writer so you would of course expect Amsterdam to be deftly written and finely executed but I'd say it falls very short of being 'brilliant'. It maintains your attention until the end, it's entertaining, it's slick and not overly complicated but at best I'd call it 'interesting'. It's a modern day black comedy going over some very old ground. How it won the Booker Prize in 1998 is a mystery and the real conundrum.

John Serpico